Karl Radek

Karl Radek (31 October 1885-19 May 1939) was a Lithuanian Jewish Marxist revolutionary who was a key figure in the Comintern. Radek was involved in social democratic movements in both Germany and Poland before World War I, and he would later become a member of the Bolsheviks in Russia; Radek was executed during Joseph Stalin's Great Purge in 1939.

Biography
Karol Sobelsohn was born on 31 October 1885 in Lemberg, Austria-Hungary (now Lviv, Ukraine) to a family of Lithuanian Jews. Radek became an active socialist in his youth, taking on the alias of "Karl Radek", with the surname coming from the Polish novel "Labors of Sisyphus". From 1905 to 1907, he was imprisoned by the Russian Empire for his involvement in the failed 1905 revolution, and he was harassed by the Polish Socialist Party due to being Jewish. Rosa Luxemburg and Leo Jogiches, two fellow Marxist revolutionaries, stood up for him and enlisted his help with forming the socialist movement in Germany.

Radek arrived in Russia following the 1917 Russian Revolution, but he was refused recognition as an official representative of the Soviet Union. Radek decided to return to Germany and join the Spartacist Uprising, and he was imprisoned from 12 February 1919 to January 1920. Radek was visited by Enver Pasha, Walter Rathenau, and Ruth Fischer while he was in prison, as the Weimar Republic began to think about forming an alliance with other nations that had been wronged by the Treaty of Versailles, such as the Ottoman Empire and the Russian SFSR.

Downfall during the Great Purge
Radek would return to Russia on his release and become the Secretary of the Comintern for German issues, and he sought to form a united front with other socialist organizations. From the summer of 1925 to May 1927, he was the Provost of Moscow Sun Yat-sen University, debating Joseph Stalin's "Socialism in one country" ideology. This led to him being fired and expelled from the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, and he was sent to Tobolsk and then to Tomsk in 1928. In 1937, he was sentenced to ten years of penal labor, and NKVD chief Lavrentiy Beria had him executed at the Verkhneuralsk gulag, claiming that he had died in a fight with other prisoners.